Breakaway is a piece of software that takes all audio heading to your soundcard and processes the dynamic range with up to seven bands of compressors based on presets and some simple controls. It is mostly useful for smoothing out uneven volume levels between songs from different albums and improving audibility of quieter portions of music by boosting the volume. It's similar to what radio stations use to give a consistent sound across songs. It works like the volume leveler in Hijack only much better!

After having a listen, is anyone possibly interest in a hardware version of this?

Let me know,
Stu

It's funny you should bring this up since I was just reading about something similar from Dolby.

I don't see why everyone these days is taking a plain old multiband compressor and marketing it as something new...

A hardware version of this would be fun for the car. The trick would be making it work either within the empeg (with controlling features integrated into Hijack), or make it work on a four-channel output, so that it could be daisy chained into the empeg's outputs.

Seems to me that the best implementation for us empeggers would be to somehow port its code into the player kernel so that we could get its benefits without needing additional hardware. It shouldn't take *that* many CPU cycles to implement a decent multiband compressor on the empeg, should it?

The Dolby version sounds cool; not too much info on it yet though.

As I understand it, Breakaway requires floating point and 32-bits without a major overhaul. The code behind this one is supposed to be state-of-the-art and done by someone who eats, sleeps, and dreams this stuff. His implementation of it is very transparent and well done. I would not want to devote programming resources to an outmoded device like the Empeg, but I suspect there is enough talent around here that it could be done, I just wouldn't know how to do it without paying someone .

I think if I were to make a hardware version it would be mainly to accept the output of an MP3 player since CD and radio is usually volume leveled anyway.

Stu

MP3s are as equally as volume-leveled as the CDs they're ripped from. So if you made a hardware version, it would work great on CD players too.

I see your point about how porting the code to a floating point processor would be fairly easy, whereas doing it for the empeg would be hard because it wouldn't be a straight code port.

Maybe I'm the only one that listens in this manner, but I tend to listen to CDs where all the tracks are mastered together (an album) whereas with MP3s, I shuffle the songs so I may hear a recording from 1984 followed by a modern one which would likely require some fiddling with the volume knob. Still, even listening to a CD with say, Bohemian Rhapsody, such a box would help in a car with CDs .

I think the only practical way to make an aftermarket device would be to have the processor in the signal chain just before the master volume control device such as a headunit feading an amplifier. If you installed it after the headunit, you would not be able to control the volume effectively because you would just be fighting the AGC in the processor. The only other way would be to cram the processor into the dash or center console somewhere which I don't think is too practical a solution.

Stu

There are ID3 tags for this express purpose. There is even one for when you're listening to a whole album and another for when you're listening to individual tracks.

Of course, finding a player that supports them might be another story.

SqueezeBox supports both tag types (putting one in a car is a little bit of a PITA). iPods support at least the iTunes Normalization tag (which is song-based).

I've tried that approach, but I find they aren't all that effective as the perceived volume levels end up being too varied between songs and it still does not combat against ambient noise such as would be found in a car which would tend to drown out quieter parts of songs. The purpose of such a processor is to reduce dynamic range in a controlled way to provide a consistent sound across sources, but also to avoid getting blasted away when you crank the volume to hear quiter parts which inevitably are followed by substanially louder parts. MP3gain and similar approaches do not combat this. I use Breakaway quite a bit with Pandora which I obviously could not use an ID3 tag normalizer with anyway.

It's not necessarily for serious listening; it's for casual listening, background music, mobile audio, television, etc.

Stu